Game prototyping with pygame

I’m subscribed to a few gaming-related blogfeeds and Lost Garden is one of my favorites. Today Lost Garden’s Danc posted a new game prototyping challenge: “Play With Your Peas”. The challenge is to build a game based on Danc’s game idea, using his (free!) graphics. The game idea and the graphics were both very attractive, so I decided to dive in.

I used Istanbul to record a screencast of the result after 10-odd hours of hacking with pygame. Download the .ogg here. (I’m too tired/lazy to convert it to another format. If you can’t open it with your browser, use right-click and save-as to download it and play it with VLC. I might upload a better version tomorrow.) The basic level-building code is done, the rest isn’t. :) Grab the code here, but keep in mind that it was written in a rush by a pygame noob. ;) I used the code of this tutorial as a starting point. One obvious mistake I made was reloading each sprite over and over again but that doesn’t keep it from working. The code should run on all OS’s that are supported by pygame. You’ll need a copy of Danc’s graphics, extracted to a subdirectory called ‘data’.

I threw the unfinished code online because I don’t know if I’ll keep on working on it after today. There is still a lot of work to do on my master thesis so my focus will be there from now on. :)